Book of the Week

 House on Sweeney Street. (FootHills Publishing 2025) by Martha Deed

 

By Editor Sharon Waller Knutson
Martha Deed proves her skill as a storyteller and historian with precise detail as she describes the events behind the house she lives in.

About the Book:

The House on Sweeney Street is Martha Deed's fourth poetry collection from FootHills Publishing.  With Sweeney, Martha extends her curiosity about history and culture, the influence of past events on current cultural values and behavior to the earliest days of a small Western New York settlement beginning with a highly questionable treaty that strongly resembles a contemporary real estate deal or politics.  

She bought the house directly from the husband and wife who designed and built the house in 1956.  She learned from them how that house came to be.  But there was more to learn and to understand, starting with the Title and Survey for the house.  Fortunately for this project, the Title began with sale of the land by the Holland Land Company to Solomon Havens, an early member of the US Congress, in 1835. That entry is followed by a list of all manner of owners from freed slaves, a physician, bankers, lawyers, farmers, lumbermen, scoundrels and rescuers.  

The Holland Land Compay had purchased the land from from Robert Morris who had purchased the land by treaty from the Indians.  Records associated with constructing the Erie Canal (which borders the Sweeney Street property) offered more detail and suggested more leads.  In fact, there were so many disputes over the land under this house from the 1820s into the early 1900s, that Martha's real estate lawyer asked her if she was certain she wanted to complete the purchase.  Since the litigants were all long dead, Martha persisted in the deal, but she wanted to know more.  

Who was connected to the land under the house?  What were their lives like?  And why ‒ when nearby houses were built as early as the 1830s ‒ was her house, the first structure on this particular plot, not built until 1956? Town and city historical records available online, several extensive databases of historical newspapers along with local historical society collections gave her a headstart.  But reading between the lines demanded a collection of poems, not a local history.

Poetry gave her room to wander from contemporary people and events back to previous owners of the land and to explore how past events, whether we are aware of them or not, influence contemporary culture and values, how our personal histories may blind us to what is obvious to others.

As she wrote in her poem, Red Trillium,

If there aren’t enough facts for a story
write a poem

Favorite poems from the book:


Red Trillium

1

We kept them in a green wire cage
so rare were they, kept them confined
lest they be eaten by a passing deer
or picked by a roving child
drawn to history blurred by myth
layer upon layer
generation by generation

Who caused those flowers to grow
first North of Sweeney Street
now caged South of Sweeney Street
by way of wind or theft?

Sometimes truth cannot be unraveled 
despite bare assertions laid out in Census
records, old newspapers, children’s observations
oral histories or even learned journals

Lives intertwined
the preyed-upon and the protected

If there aren’t enough facts for a story
write a poem

2

Two Blacks arrived in 1825 or so
They lived on Sweeney land
before the Holland Land Company
made its first sale of that Lot
 
Hannah Johnson born a slave in Albany and freed
John Johnson escaped the South and followed
the Erie Canal to North Tonawanda

listed as Farmer   person of color   untaxed
owner of a frame house and 12 acres
resident in that place for 25 years in 1855  
but how they found that place
built their house or even where it was ‒
unknown officially ‒ tho’ Ladies 
seeking tea leaf readings 
and local children seeking cupcakes with maple sugar
knew where to find her

When a tiny dot marked J Johnson
appeared on Jesse Locke’s land 
in Beers Atlas 1860 ‒ Locke 
the first resident physician
North Tonawanda had ever known ‒
 
Should not the dot
confirm the point
of ownership?

3    Intestate

Locke died before his time at 51
so perhaps can be forgiven
even though he was a physician
for not knowing death was near
for not listing land transactions
his debts his treasures

or the status of the corner of Lot 10
where John and Hannah Johnson
had lived ‒ peacefully ‒ for 35 years
 
The rumors of a station
on the Underground Railroad
in that house not reduced to writing
either ‒ known only by whispers
in safe places and never certain

When Locke’s heirs sold Lot 10 piecemeal
John Johnson’s ownership of his house and farm 
became uncertain ‒ could have been the Northern 
version of Black farmers driven off their land South
of the Mason-Dixon Line ‒ their rights to ownership
reduced to squatters or trespassers on their own premises

It was a scheme designed by Thomas Jefferson
Yes ‒ that Thomas Jefferson
 
To promote this disposition to exchange lands,
which [Blacks] have to spare and we [Whites] want
we shall push our trading houses . . .
and be glad to see them run in debt. . .
they become willing to lop [debt] off
by a cessation of lands1
 
But it didn’t happen that way
because the neighbor on the other side stepped in

and paid their legal bills for two decades
until the matter was settled

it was claimed by the plaintiffs, Jesse F Locke
had sold by parol to said Johnson in his life-time
and had received the purchase price thereof
but had executed and delivered
no conveyance thereof 2

Yet all the while as the White men fought 
Hannah Johnson cared for others’ children 
offered plants from her garden to the sick
read tea leaves for ladies contemplating marriage
and grew Red Trillium

until 18 years after the fight began
the judges said

defendant [Hannah Johnson] was in lawful
possession3

Her home secured ‒ she died soon after
her fortune-telling silenced
her black kettle cold on her stove
her garden left to weeds
save her Red Trillium
that spread by memory and wind
 
More Ghost Than Man

It isn’t just the years you live

102? 70? 104? 36?

but how you live them

Were you always sick
or did you have adventures
wonderful to remember
even if you cannot walk
anymore?

Do you cling like a dry leaf in Winter
to a tree already sprouting buds for Spring?

Do you enjoy reading a newspaper?
(Can you see?)

Are there people around you
who toss you into the air
as if you were more ghost than man?
Do they know how funny you are?

A joker in the face of incapacity or death?


The News Value of a Life

    After James Tate

Once again, my breakfast of oatmeal and dried cranberries was fatally compromised by Joan’s whining as she perused the day’s paper.  “I have told you,” I said, “not to read the news at the breakfast table.  It disturbs my digestion.  Now it will take all day for my pipes to work before I can sit down to write. Joan looked at me with what appeared to be an unpleasant mien. “She’s not there,” she said. “Not even in the ‘Overlooked’ section where they celebrate the lives of forgotten women.” “So what?” I said.  “She’s dead,” I said.  I took another bite of the cooling gluey mixture that I am forced to swallow to prolong my life.  “Take Bernadette Mayer, that guardian of the Poetry Project ‒ I went to The New School with her but didn’t appreciate her just as the Times has snubbed her now.  She knew everybody. She waited six days for the Times to take notice of her corpse ‒ which is how she would have put it  ‒ and she had even provided a headline ‘Unconditional Death is a Good Title.’  But No. After five days, I wrote one of my best protest poems ever about the slight and got it accepted by a discerning editor who threw it back onto my desk when the tardy obit appeared. Your dead sister thought her funeral at Frank Campbell’s would do the trick, but not even a high class funeral can break the curse of unimportance or the litigious nature of her demise.”  Seeing that Joan had put her paper down but had not left the room, I continued.  “They won’t take notice of your sister until the dust has settled in the courts.  Everyone knew the famous lawyer’s chauffeur who struck your sister dead in front of Tiffany’s was a fool after he drove their limousine onto the tarmac at Newark when sent to meet a 10 year-old’s plane from Buffalo.  Eat your breakfast,” I said. “As of yesterday, you have lived 30,000 days.  Think about whether any one of them would justify a New York Times obit.”

To buy the book:



Or an autographed copy at mldeed@gmail.com. 
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